Christiane Taubira in the context of "2002 French presidential election"

Sépélu (or Cépérou in French) was a seventeenth century indigenous Kali'na chief, or yopoto, in what is now French Guiana. Oral histories recount that he sold or ceded land to the French circa 1643, namely the hill of Fort Cépérou which is now named after him. He is also remembered a native leader who resisted colonisation.

In 2003, Christiane Taubira held a competition to rename the international airport in Cayenne. Its previous namesake, Rochambeau, was deemed unfit because his son, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, had brutally attempted to quell the Haitian Revolution. Four schoolchildren won Taubira's competition with the name Sépélu. However, the airport was eventually named after Black colonial official Félix Eboué in 2012.

The Gauche Plurielle (French for Plural Left) was a left-wing coalition in France, composed of the Socialist Party (Parti socialiste or PS), the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français or PCF), the Greens, the Left Radical Party (Parti radical de gauche or PRG), and the Citizens' Movement (Mouvement des citoyens or MDC). Succeeding Alain Juppé's conservative government, the Plural Left governed France from 1997 to 2002. It was another case of cohabitation between rival parties at the head of the state and of the government (Jacques Chirac as president and Lionel Jospin as prime minister). Following the failure of the left in the 2002 legislative election, it was replaced by another conservative government, this time headed by Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

The Plural Left government initiated several reforms, including the CMU social welfare program for indigents, the PACS civil union law, the 35 hours workweek, the creation of the FNAEG DNA database, but also several privatizations (France Télécom, GAN, Thomson Multimédia, Air France, Eramet, Aérospatiale, Autoroutes du sud de la France). It also passed the SRU Law forcing each commune to have a 20% quota of housing projects, the 15 June 2000 Guigou law on presumption of innocence, the Taubira Law recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity, and the LSQ law concerning security. Furthermore, Jospin's government carried out a partial regularization of undocumented immigrants.